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  • Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries transed. by Amanda Ewington
  • Vera Proskurina (bio)
Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. and trans. Amanda Ewington. Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014. xvi + 512 pp. $ 45.95. ISBN 978-0-7727-2162-4.

Amanda Ewington’s bilingual edition of Russian women poets from the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries offers a distinctive contribution to the history of Russian literature as well as to women and gender studies. Ewington has collected, translated, and provided detailed introductions and commentary on poems that have never before been published in such a complete, accurate, and scholarly format.

Russian women poets of the eighteenth century have not received much attention in academic works. Wendy Rosslyn’s Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry in Russia (1997) and Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi’s Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 (2007) remain the main monographs treating the topic. For many years, readers had to rely upon random and fragmentary translations found in monographs or articles, without any opportunity to verify their sketchy impressions. The anthology by Ewington perfectly fills this lacuna: it collects a massive corpus of poems and presents it in both the original Russian and a parallel English translation.

By gathering a range of almost unknown poems found in the pages of rare Russian magazines or even hidden in the Russian archives, Ewington showcases women’s prominent position in Russian culture. Starting with the earliest of these, the eighteenth-century poet Ekaterina Kniazhnina, and ending with the most well-known, Anna Bunina, the editor presents an impressive gallery of seventeen women whose poems taken together demonstrate the existence of a vibrant poetic discourse, despite the fact that it was rarely been either noticed or examined by literary scholars. Among those represented in this collection, Ekaterina Urusova, the most prolific poet of the eighteenth century, receives the greatest attention from the editor who offers excellent translations of her poems. Urusova’s works were especially important because they demonstrated the ability of a woman poet to go beyond the limits imposed on her gender, to work in a variety of genres, and to achieve what one might almost call a professional status even in the eighteenth century. Her epic poem Polion, or The Misanthrope Enlightened, takes as its subject a search for a true wisdom and enlightenment of heart and feelings as opposed to dry philosophical speculations, a subject that suggests the [End Page 256] possible influence of Masonic thought through her mentor Mikhail Matveyervich Kheraskov rather than that of modern secular society and the Age of Reason. The second successful work by Urusova was her Heroides, a cycle of lyric poems addressed by female characters to their lovers, which display deep psychological dimensions. These accomplished, dramatic monologues foreshadow Romantic poetry of the next century.

The imperial government in eighteenth-century Russia almost completely controlled the world of literature by co-opting writers to its service. Women poets, with rare exceptions such as Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (whose poetry, however, is missing here because it does not fit the parameters of the edition), a famous friend and ally of Catherine II, avoided this control by remaining unnoticed in their marginal poetic niches and by engaging in home-based literary circles, or by publishing in magazines with very limited circulation, and by communicating their work only to close relatives or friends. Far away from the political patronage of the state, they avoided following the models of official “masculine” poetry (laudatory solemn odes, long historic poems with political allusions, and triumphant inscriptions) and developed their own small genres of so-called “light poetry.”

With great dexterity, Ewington traces the relationships of women poets with men of letters, like Alexander Sumarokov or Mikhail Kheraskov. Moreover, the female poets of the eighteenth century in their salons (like the circle of the literary magazine Evenings in 1772–73 that formed around Elizaveta Kheraskova) ridiculed “male” literary production. Above all, they parodied the archaic structure and stilted language of official odes. As Ewington shows, women poets cherished the more “personalized,” intimate genres (love songs, elegies...

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